I really loved these episodes, although in the end my approach to the story was as different from either of yours as yours were from each other: which is to say, different in details, but perhaps similar on the broad outline.
First things first: obviously this is a story about the corporate world, about living this sort of life, just as Wolfe says in his afterwards. "Kafkaesque", which Glenn used, is right, not only because of bureaucracy-as-nightmare aspects, but also because it has humor mixed in with the nightmare, as well as a big dose of surrealism. So about the themes, the phenomenology (as Brendan (I think it was?) put it)— all that, I completely agree.
Where I disagree, I think, is in the puzzles/what's really happening aspect.
To take the puzzles first. I think this is a Wolfe story that, more than any he ever wrote, is not about the puzzles. This is a story about the themes. If you try and solve the puzzles — and I think you fell into this trap a bit, with the 12 afterlives from the red book (I'll get to my reading of that in a minute) or pairing up the 9 answers in the final line with the types of explainers (an approach that Glenn torpedoed right before you did it by pointing out the reversed order: I would argue that that might well be Wolfe specifically eliminating the sort of reading you did, by showing the order was not stable & couldn't be matched!) — then you miss the point. This is about the themes, the experience, the social critique. It's a very funny story in many places. And it's a nightmare, and one that, as you point out, Wolfe lives. That's what the story means.
Ok. But what's really happening?
I will admit I came in with a pretty firm interpretation (which I heard before, after I read it for the first time), and heard nothing, nor saw anything in my reread of the story, to change my mind; but perhaps I was overly closed minded. Still, here is the reading, which is not mine, but from my friend Eric Van, who I believe used to be on the Wolfe forums sometimes back in the day.
The reading is that the story is literally and purposefully ambiguous.
There are three options — the three options listed at the end by the explainer:
“You may have been oppressed by demons,” the small man said. “Or revived by unseen aliens who, landing on the Earth eons after the death of the last man, have sought to re-create the life of the twentieth century. Or it may be that there is a small pressure, exerted by a tumor in your brain.”
Of course there are others, as he said. But the point is the story fits with all of them. Which means that the story can be read fully as fantasy, SF or mainstream, depending on what you pick; the story is, again, undecided and undecidable between the three.
One of the reasons I like this reading is that it forces you back into the themes. Forlesen is having this experience, one which captures (in a clearer air, as GW says) the experience of many people in the working world. Whether it is caused by demons or aliens or tumors isn't the point: the point is the nightmarish, hilarious, hellish experience that mirrors what so many of us go through.
(Wolfe expresses the sympathy he so obviously feels—in the story from the inside here, I think, already from the outside: this was written before he became a full-time professional writer, but I get the impression he liked the job editing Plant Management—in The Castle of the Otter, where he says "Jack Woodford notes that what most people who say they want to write really want is to quit work... I have more than a little sympathy for the people who feel that way—an appalling number of jobs absolutely stink; I am fortunate in that I have fallen into one of the few good ones.")
Most of the puzzles, I think, are explicable in purely thematic terms. Why is the cop a robot? Because the cops are part of the machine that makes this society run. Why do all the EFs look alike? Because they're all the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. Why do mirrors not work? Because this is a society that doesn't let us see ourselves, any more than it lets us be creative or curious. Why does Forlesen remember nothing but his name? Because our ignorance of the past, our lack of ability to remember, is what got us here — as a society, and as individuals (we forget who we are). Why do they get Forlesen's name wrong? It's pure satire of a technological society. It's always about the themes. (You covered a lot of this ground in the show.)
What's up with Abraham Beale? He is how we got here, in mythical form: we came from the farm, did lots of things, but came to the city—in part because society and government forced us (took our farms)— and now are adrift. He's not a symbol of Christ, but a mythic version of the American past.
So what's up with the religious book and the twelve afterlives? I think the book represents all religion: in the corporate world of the 70s & before, it is there, but it is hard to find: it's buried under the technical manuals of the society, and really, you don't have time to read it, you need to read the manuals & get to work! And as such, it outlines what could be seen as a survey of all the different sorts of things that various faiths or philosophies have taught happen to people after they die: they are reincarnated, they live the same lives again, nothing ("sleep"), they become ghosts, etc. This also explains why heaven (garden) and hell (torment) are a single option: because they tend to go together in (e.g.) Christian belief. These are twelve views of the afterlife; but who has time for those?
What's up with the types of explainers? They are the types of people that people look to for meaning. Actors are there because some people really would go to Tom Cruise (God help us).
And what do the answers at the end mean?
They mean exactly what they sound like. Who knows if this has meaning. Yes, no, and maybe. Any puzzle interpretation lessens them, in my view. I often wonder if any type of suffering I, or others, endure means anything; and I often think that the only answer there is is "No… Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Yes. Maybe."
Again, I loved the episodes, and you did a really great job of touring the themes — which, as I said, and as you both said, is what matters. For what it's worth, this is what I think we know about what "happens": we explicitly and deliberately can't say.
I have some other thoughts on specific things you said, more minor details of the story, but for now I'll stop here. That's the big picture, as I see it.
God I love this story. One of Wolfe's very, very best, in my view.
Graeber's work is really superb. His book Debt, which it sounds like the talk you heard was drawn from, is really fabulous— wonderfully eye-opening about all sorts of things. He also has a lot of other interesting essays. Given your military experience, one you might particularly like is this: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-army-of-altruists He was also one of the first academics to write about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Anyway, the bullshit jobs piece is great, as is the one linked above, but above all Debt.
Incidentally, as you probably know, the Promised Land in the Jewish tradition isn't for the end of time; it's a very real and physical place, eretz yisrael, where Israel/Palestine now are (that, indeed, is one of the roots of the trouble!) It's promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then delivered to Joshua. There is a messianic hope of return, of course (some religious Jews were anti-zionist because they thought the Zionists were preempting God), but it's nothing like the Christian New Jerusalem. I don't one would say of it that the Jews didn't labor to create it (I mean, they didn't, but no more or less than anything else; God made it along with the rest of the Earth.)
I will have to keep my eye out for Ellul's book, and also for Walker Percy, whom I have heard of but never read. Is Lancelot a good place to begin?
Okay, as promised (or threatened), a few further thoughts on more minor points.
Was I the only one who read the name of the company as part of the joke? Maybe there's some real thing I don't know about, but "model pattern products" sounds like satire: what it means for something to be a model pattern is hard to imagine (not a real pattern, just a model one?), and "pattern products" is again almost tautological. At the same time, the name is vacuous in precisely the same way that so much of the corporate speak in the story is.
You glossed over the bit in the "pseudo game" (another joke!) about Forlesen's state & strategy. He saw he owned all the stock in International Toys & Foods (what a company name!), and then offered to sell "ffoulks" (presumably the stock in that company?) at a price, and buy it at a higher price. The man next to him tries to buy & sell 500 shares in one go, but Forlesen slows him down; he sells the man 500 shares... and then walks out the door as the man gets coffee. In short: he tricks him.
The game itself is a delicious parody, but I think it's supposed to be more serious, too. You point out that the fact that it's called a pseudo game means it's not really a game, i.e. it's really real. I think it represents, quite directly, the stock market, which people treat as a game, buying and selling, but which of course really affects real people's lives. (You sort of hint around this but don't quite say it, I don't think.)
The above two points go together: the pseudo-game is what really happens in a financialized (when Forlesen was written, we might have said "financializing") economy: people play tricks to get ahead, it's all a game, but real people get hurt.
Brandon kept referring to The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul (I think it was?), which I haven't read, but I wonder if it is that particular book that Wolfe was referring to, or if there were others making similar points? I kept thinking that Ellul, at least as Brandon summarized it, sounded fairly similar to Heidegger on technology.
I very much agreed with you that the inability to read (at home, at work) was part of the hellishness Wolfe depicts. It's part and parcel, I think, of the inability to find time to grapple with higher things: the corporatized culture smashes it. I am reminded of what Wolfe, in his marvelous GOH speech at Readercon 1 (reprinted in Castle of Days, incorporated into a longer text under the title "From a House on the Borderland", but I heard it live!): "This, then, is the new illiteracy, the illiteracy of those who can read but don't." (If I were to edit a Best of Gene Wolfe, I think I'd put that speech in.
Finally, the story made you think of various books; it made me think of two texts.
First, there's the late David Graeber's essay on bullshit jobs (which he later turned into a book, but I haven't read the longer version). Obviously Graeber wasn't a direct influence on Wolfe (the essay was written decades later), but see if you can hear why I thought of it:
(By the by, he defines bullshit jobs as jobs that the people who do them think are valueless; he's not trying to tell people things they care about have no value!)
The second text I thought of—in this case, not when reading the story, but when the two of you were talking (well & aptly) about the way that modern technological society takes away meaning and purpose, was a bit of Orwell's essay on the Spanish Civil War (which Wolfe at least in theory might have read):
This is not, I feel fairly sure, a notion Wolfe would accept: it's at the root of Orwell's democratic socialism (and mine). But I think the point is apt: Wolfe is concerned about the inattention to religion (the red book), buried under the necessity to make a living. He blames corporate culture. But of course it is not a return to the middle ages (!!) that would enable people to contemplate higher things; it's ideas like Keynes's 15-hour workweek, universal basic income, and the like. (Keynesian socialism is, of course, what all the purposeless efficiency that Brandon discusses (and Wolfe depicts) really ought to be for: we get efficient so we can go live our lives. Keynes, famously, was right about productivity levels (we've reached the place which he thought would enable everyone to work a 15-hour week); he was just wrong about what the consequence would be (a tiny slice of humanity grabbed all the gains and left the rest of us, in Orwell's phrase, "drudging like an ox".
I don't claim that either of these quotes are directly related to Wolfe's story. But they are relevant to it: which is itself related to the story's brilliance. It fits in the Great Conversation, as the Great-Books people like to put. It's simply marvelous.
I agree that there is a Christian element to Abraham Beale (and that the Christianity of the American past was undoubtedly part of Wolfe's imagining of it). But I think he's less a symbol of Christ than a symbol of Christianity, if that makes sense. Why the name Abraham? Well, of course, Abraham is the founder of the Jewish people (in Hebrew he's referred to as Avraham avinu, "Abraham our Father", just as Moses is Moshe rabainu, "Moses our Teacher"), and since he's of the founding generation of this world, I think that's a lot of it. But of course Abraham is also famous as a man of faith — a Knight of Faith, if I remember my Kierkegaard correctly. So I think he's not a Christ-figure so much as a Christian figure, or just a general religious figure: from the days when the faith was more than a red book buried under various instruction manuals.
As for the government taking the farm... yeah, I wouldn't have blamed government particularly either. But, as you say, Wolfe might have seen it as playing a bigger role. And also, this is a story, not an academic tract: "gov took it" is a lot easier to sum up in a line than "complex forces of industrialization rendered it unprofitable and we sold out to a large agribusiness" would be. (Also, given the way that the government/corporate forces are seen as aligned in this story, I think it's a less important distinction in this case.)
I like the idea that this is related to his trying to get out of Proctor & Gamble. Although, to be fair, at least Wolfe got to create Pringles! Not clay I guess but it's a lot more tangible than anything poor Forlesen got to do. :)
As for nostalgia: I hear you. It's been a big year for you in many ways (fatherhood?!?), not to mention the ways in which it's been a long year for all of us! And time slips away fast, at our age and in our time.
Your post about t his depressing Kafka-esque nightmare of a story that calls attention to the weaknesses of our system that is now crumbling around us has somehow managed to fill me with nostalgia. We recorded this episode in the summer of 2019, and it was the last episode(s) of the show that we recorded in my old place before my wife and I moved to the suburbs to start our family. Now Brandon's left the area entirely, the world is crumbling around us, and I haven't been in a coffee shop since March 7th ... so this has made me wistful. This was definitely one of those stories that just took over my brain for a month while we worked on it -- always a great feeling.
I love your reading of the story. The one place where I want to push back is in your interpretation of Abraham Beale. I don't think you can divorce Wolfe's image of America's mythic past from Christianity -- as we see in our own political discourse, the two are quite intertwined. Or, maybe: the question of whether they really are is an ideological issue. But here's a serious question for you about Wolfe's understanding of the end of small-hold farming. I certainly wouldn't include government in that mix at all, other than to say that government could have taken measures to protect farmers from the consequences of the Industrial Revolution but didn't (and I don't know that anyone would really have thought in those terms in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries -- certainly no one involved in government because they, of course, were the owner class). But as a William F. Buckely conservative at this time (maybe?), perhaps Wolfe saw government as bearing a bigger share of the blame than I do?
One more note. Wolfe was still in Houston working at Proctor & Gamble when he wrote this story, but it wasn't long after that he took the job at Plant Engineering. I suspect that writing this story (and Hour of Trust) and looking for a new job might be related.